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Across the Great Divide.
That was where the Earth was. It's wasn't that far away, really, when you thought of it in terms of miles. Roughly (but not exactly) the distance between western Wisconsin and New York City. A couple days drive. More if you happened to have a car on it's last legs, but it was still an entirely attainable goal with a little determination and some spending money.
No amount of money or a decent car would make the trip from there, though. No amount of luck would, either. That was the problem when it came down to it... distance meant nothing and the Divide meant everything.
Mike Nelson knew that as he watched his home planet below, leaning against the wall and looking out the viewport. He knew it from the perspective of a landlubber farmboy who hadn't even dreamed of being shot into space in real life, let alone to watch movies of all things. Sure, he had the same dreams most other kids did when he was a tyke; dreams of being an astronaut, dreams of seeing the planet he dwelled on from space. But he knew that it would never happen, and he would probably end up elsewhere. Maybe he'd stay on the farm and follow his father, or maybe he would head for the city and make it big.
Now he was there, and the earth was below him in a dance of brown and white and blue and green. It was a breathtaking sight, one that made him feel incredibly small and terribly helpless. He wasn't the type who felt that way often, either... just when he was up there, and everything he knew was many many miles below.
So he went crazy. He had never been the most sane man to begin with, but his life had been fairly typical. Grew up, left home to make it big, ended up working for minimum wage, and then one day it all changed. A flash of white, a brief moment of pain, a dream-studded period of blackness and then he was in orbit.
NASA trained it's astronauts for years. Mike grinned slightly as he thought of the irony... there was no doubt in his mind; he wasn't cut out for space. They trained for years to spend a fairly short period of time then go back... he never trained for anything and he had been here for a lot longer than a week or a month or even a year. So what could he do besides go loopy in the head and laugh away the fact that he was trapped far away from home?
Nothing. He had companions, and though they went out of their way to drive him even further over the edge, he had grown to love them more than anyone would get him to admit to... they were the closest thing he had to family here. And even if he didn't like it, he had some entertainment from the movies sent.
But every once in a while, when it was late and the insanity slipped away, he found himself looking at life from the view of an outsider. That was when he would spend half the night with a cold cup of coffee, a pen, a notebook or any other paper he could get his hands on. And he wrote.
He was in that mood now... the reflective, watchful kind. He doubted Tom or Crow or Gypsy would ever understand that; afterall, they had lived their whole lives on the Satellite, and he had a hard time explaining things off of the paper. That in itself had earned him the title of "Not-so-Bright" when he was actually pretty sharp. They hadn't seen that... the first time he looked out and saw his home below, he had tucked the introspection away and concentrated on living day by day.
Really, he was like that in a lot of ways. He had always had a good sense of humor, and he never questioned destiny. Not even now, despite everything. But the more quiet aspects of his personality were the ones he had locked away... they saw his sense of humor, and on occasion they caught a glimpse of his temper (mild though it usually was), or of his affectionate side. They didn't see just how deep the ability for kindness and tolerance ran, though, and he wasn't sure they would understand if they did. Mike was the type who could forgive easily, and when it came down to it, he did the right thing. He didn't see the world in shades of gray, he saw it in black and white. Right and wrong. In another universe, he could have very easily been a hero.
Now he was just a farmboy trapped in space on an old satellite to watch bad movies. Life was funny like that... one minute you're a minimum-wage temp worker, and the next you're part of a completely insane experiment to take over the world. He knew he wouldn't crack, no matter how miserable sitting in the theater was... it was too insane and he was too much a rebel to ever give into anything of that sort. The only thing that came close to driving him to a gibbering vegetable was the isolation, but that only happened at times like these, looking out at the planet below.
He smiled to himself. It was a beautiful thing to see, and even though it made him feel small, he never failed to lose his breath for a moment. Turning away and heading back for the bridge, he fought away the urge to completely lose it again easily, as he always had and always would. Even if he was there, and his home was far far below.
Across the Great Divide.